Esquire October 2013

57 DAVID GRANGER (b. 1956) EDITOR IN CHIEF, ESQUIRE THE LIFE OF MAN AN EXPLANATORY NOTE Eighty years. It's the life of a man. You live a good long life, you get to eighty. Maybe you don't feel cheated when the bell rings. A great Esquire writer, Tom Chiarella, wrote me something like that when we were trying to figure out what to do to take notice of Esquire's eightieth. The life of a man. It became the notion around which this issue was built. So we set out to create a portfolio: eighty photographs of eighty extraordinary men, from age eighty to one. A portrait of the American man now. Yes, it's a portrait of what we look like, but it's also a portrait that shows how we got…

Barack Obama's fifty-two-year share of the past eighty years almost precisely spans the profound transformation of American society from the oppression of Jim Crow to the elevation of a black man to the White House. As much as any American alive, he has experienced, and even embodies, the sweep and scope of change during those decades. As with the other prominent men we photographed for this issue, we asked the president a couple questions about his life. We obviously have seen extraordinary changes in the country since 1961. When you were born, for instance, laws in a couple dozen states prohibited interracial relationships. Growing up, were you aware of how recently your own parents' relationship would have been illegal? And what effect did that have on you? I grew up…

If it weren't for a woman on a train, Mark Mann would have been a potter. Maybe a painter. But one day, at 16, happy with his potting or painting future, the Glasgow native found himself on a train to Edinburgh, sitting next to a beautiful woman. They got to talking. The woman studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic. Which meant that soon after, Mann was studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, too. Things didn't work out with the woman, but after that day Mann's path was set—and the Life of Man project became much less reliant on clay. Mann moved to New York, where he shot celebrity portraiture for magazines such as Vibe, Spin, Billboard, and Complex. After two decades of traditional film and digital photography, he traded in his equipment…

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. —Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," August 1936 It tasted like a first—the first time you dove into an ocean wave or made something good or touched her lips. —Michael Paterniti, "Ferran Adrià," July 2001 They danced in the grass, feet squelching, his hands on her throat. —Stephen King and Joe Hill, "In the Tall Grass," August 2012 Any of you gents ever get a hard-on, listening to those guns? —William Styron, "Love Day," August 1985 In adolescence, I had only to say "God," and I would think of my groin. —Norman Mailer, "A Piece of Harlot's Ghost," July 1988 Now a man can crack in many ways—can crack…

THINGS THAT AREN'T ACTUALLY THINGS Millennial incompetence • The Killing • Michele Bachmann • Attachment parenting • The Mumfordization of music • Hurricane Sandy–induced action on global warming • The latest from Maureen Dowd • Steven Soderbergh's retirement • The sorrows of the politician's wife • The 2013 summer-blockbuster-movie slate • The end of meat • "Happy Anniversary!" NO. 01 We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them. I would submit that these are not contradictory phenomena but rather connected. Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more…

INEXPLICABLY PERSISTENT TRENDS Zombies • Fun rednecks • Porn as a gateway to fame • Kardashiana • Racism as joke material on prime-time shows • Mixology • Poetry tattoos • The supposed rash of sluttiness among college-aged women • Nickelodeon-borne sex symbols • Folk rock 05 The Broken illuminate the unbroken. I wrote that line a couple years ago, in an article about a man named Henry Molaison, whose brain my grandfather partially destroyed. The destruction was well-intentioned: My grandfather was a neurosurgeon, and Henry came to him in the early 1950s suffering from a terrible case of epilepsy. My grandfather decided that the best way to treat Henry would be to perform an experimental resection of a large portion of his medial temporal lobes, including a small seahorse-shaped structure…